Gears of War 5 PC Specifications Released

Minimum specs for Gears of War 5 have been announced ahead of the game’s July 19th through 22nd technical test. With just two weeks to go before the test, The Coalition has unveiled the PC requirements to run the game. We’ll break them down for you here:

OS Requirements: You’ll need to be running Windows 10 x64 build 1903 (the May 2019 update). If you haven’t upgraded for some reason, you’ll want to do that now. Unlike the 1803 roll-out, this is a painless, bug-free experience.

RAM Requirements: You’ll need 6GB of RAM at a minimum. This is quite steep and puts many Raven Ridge APU-powered notebooks with 4GB of VRAM out of contention, even if they have the graphical grunt to handle the game at minimum settings. The coalition recommends 8GB of RAM while Ideal specs call for 16 GB.

GPU Requirements: You need GTX 1050-class hardware at the minimum. As far as older cards go, this means you’ll want a GTX 670 at the very least. In AMD-land this translates to the Polaris-powered RX 560 or the R9 280 if you’re on legacy hardware. HD 7970 owners rejoice! 8 full years after the launch of that card, it’s still above min spec for a modern title. Now that’s longevity!

Processor: The Coalition’s CPU requirements are surprisingly light: We’re looking at an FX 6000-series or Skylake i3 at the minimum, with Ryzen 3 recommended. Ryzen 7 and Skylake i7 parts are listed as the Ideal spec. In practice, this should mean that just about any modern quad-core should allow you to hit 60 FPS if you have the graphical grunt.

Storage: You only need 15 GB of storage space—this is because this is a multiplayer test and not the entire game. If the previous Gears games are anything to go by, expect 60GB plus as the storage requirement for the full game. The coalition mentions that 15GB of SSD storage is the Ideal storage configuration.

Why are there multiple recommended and Ideal GPUs?

The publisher also laid out “Recommended” and “Ideal” specs for the game. These are somewhat confusing because the recommended Nvidia GPUs are the GTX 970 and GTX 1660 Ti—in two entirely different performance classes. On the AMD side, we’re looking at the RX 570 and RX 5700. While it wasn’t made explicit, we believe these are recommended cards for 1080p and 1440p at 60 FPS respectively. Ideal specs call for an RTX 2080 or Radeon VII and we’re fairly certain that these are the go-to GPUs for a quality 4K/60 FPS experience.

If you’re participating in the technical test, keep track of the timelines. Pre-downloads will start at 10AM Pacific Time on July 17th, and testing will be from the 19th to the 22nd. There’s also a second technical test scheduled for July 26th-29th, also kicking off at 10AM.